Focus

On The Web

About

Amy Bautz's canvases have a liquidity that almost makes you feel that the paint on them may never dry. Droplets of mysterious fluids fly in every direction. Flowers and animals drip, cry, and bleed, merging into one another as though all of life, both substantively and temporally, was cut into pieces and later con… Read More

Amy Bautz's canvases have a liquidity that almost makes you feel that the paint on them may never dry. Droplets of mysterious fluids fly in every direction. Flowers and animals drip, cry, and bleed, merging into one another as though all of life, both substantively and temporally, was cut into pieces and later conjoined like Siamese quintuplets. Birth, life, and death play out in both animal and plant kingdoms. Amy Bautz makes the images she needs to see.

"I won¹t know if they have the effect I want until they materialize," she tells me, "I struggle with the meaninglessness of being, trying to find reason to believe. Painting is a search for that; to make things out of other things, to produce and to reproduce, to create something from the materials of self. I want art to make me want to be alive; sometimes painting itself is reason enough to be alive and the art of being alive is a kind of magic." She namechecks Michael Pollan¹s "The Botany of Desire: A Plant¹s-Eye View of the World² saying, "I was very taken by that book. I merge plant and animal life. That¹s how the world feels to me; teeming, intertwined. I often find myself funneling twenty or so simultaneous thoughts into one image, painting flowers, vegetables, and animals, often wounded or dead, overlapping on the same canvas. It lets me paint about sex, love, and reproduction in a less obvious, forward way, although there¹s usually sperm and tears flying around." Sperm And Tears; that would be a great title for a show, I tell her. "I¹m into bodily fluids," she laughs, "I thought breastfeeding was a total trip."

Invitational exhibit of drawing made as part of an interview series published in Feast Magazine, Booze Doodles, where St. Louis artists were given cocktails and pens and napkins, Aisle 1 Gallery, St. Louis, November 2012.

Two Paintings exhibited in a group show, Yellow Bear Gallery, St. Louis, November 2012.

Painting commissioned on the topic of parenthood and artmaking for exhibition at the Millstone Gallery, St. Louis, Summer 2011.

Three paintings included at an invitational exhibit at the Edwardsville Art Center, April 2011.

Sixteen new paintings exhibited August 2010 in an invitational six-person exhibit at Mad Art Gallery, St. Louis.

Six computer artworks maintained in the invitational Flat Files collection of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, currently since 2007.

Six paintings shown in an invitational, two-person show at East Central College, February through March 2009.

Three new paintings were shown in an invitational exhibit with other contemporary painters at the Edwardsville Arts Center, June through August 2008.

Paintings and computer artwork exhibited in an invitational, two-person show at Culver-Stockton Fine Art Gallery in Canton, Missouri, October through November 2005.